Wenxi Jiang

Research on leverage and asset-price fluctuations focuses on the direct effect of lax bank lending enabling financially-constrained investors to take excessive risks. Ignored are unconstrained investors speculating on higher prices during credit booms. To identify these two effects, we utilize China's staggered liberalization of stock-margin lending from 2010-2015—which encouraged a bank/brokerage-credit-fueled stock-market bubble. The direct effect is a 25 cent increase in a stock's market capitalization for each dollar of margin debt. Unconstrained investors led to an even larger increase in valuations of an additional 32 cents as they speculated on stocks likely to qualify for lending.

We use account-level data from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to show that daily price limits, a widely adopted market stabilization mechanism, may lead to unintended, destructive market behavior: large investors tend to buy on the day when a stock hits the 10% upper price limit and then sell on the next day; and their net buying on the limit-hitting day predicts stronger long-run price reversal. We also analyze a sample of special treatment (ST) stocks, which face tighter 5% daily price limits, and provide a causal validation from comparing market dynamics before and after they are assigned the ST status.

Published: Ting Chen & Zhenyu Gao & Jibao He & Wenxi Jiang & Wei Xiong, 2018. "Daily price limits and destructive market behavior," Journal of Econometrics, .